Monday May 5th – Aunty Wainwright’s and The Cunning Gnome Trap

We spent the day with my mummy today.  It’s been a long time since we were at her house and it was really lovely to see her properly without having to rush off anywhere for school or work or some other horrible deadline.  The house is full of stuff again.  They’ve been buying more stock for their antiques fairs again and because the garage is full it’s now creeping all over the house. It’s like being at Aunty Wainwright’s.  For those of you who are thinking of breaking in, please don’t bother.  Apart from the fact that you’d probably kill yourself tripping over some random item of junk about three feet inside the front door, they don’t buy or sell what you might consider ‘real’ antiques, although I can just hear my dad sputtering indignantly at that one!  They also have a cat who specialises in winding around your legs just as you decide to move forwards purposefully and will bring you crashing to the ground in one sinuous manoeuvre.  She will then undoubtedly sit on your face, breath something hideous all over you and demand either that you give her a cuddle or that you feed her, or possibly both.  It’s not worth it, really it’s not.

Mum and Dad don’t really go in for Lalique glassware or Limoges china, or even diamante from QVC.  They buy whatever grabs their fancy, and because they’re quite fanciful there is some really odd stuff around. Stuff that only a mother could love.

Here is an example of some things in their house at the moment:

1. A stack of six brown leather suitcases in varying sizes right by the front door in a teetering pile.  Most of them look as if an elephant has sat on them.
2. A lot of bits of paper to do with how to put an Austin Seven back together again using only a bull dog clip and some powdered egg.  These are all yellowing and smell of engine oil.
3. Twenty thousand postcards of things like ‘hop picking in Rexall on Sea’ or ‘two Dutch boys with faces like smacked bottoms by a windmill.’  Most of them are from people like ‘your friend Enid’ who had a bad chest cold on Thursday, was horrified by a baboon’s bottom on Monday and wishes that she wasn’t allergic to Candlewick by Saturday.
4. A mountain of miscellaneous buttons all of which need sorting out and putting away from the greedy hands and mouths of small, fat boys who think they might be chok lit.
5. A framed ‘Bat out of Hell’ poster that is about five feet by three feet and very, very ugly but impossible to ignore.  Meat’s eyes follow you around the room.
6. Fourteen small occasional tables for the placing of potted plants and other random detritus thereon.
7. A nineteen twenties bed frame made out of what looks like hessian sacking, which is wedged against the back of the sofa and sprouting large lumps of horsehair, where it clearly needs some TLC, or the tip.  It also makes it impossible to open the French Windows in the Lounge.  You cannot open the French Windows in the dining room either because these are obscured by stacks of books with titles like: ‘Fell Walking on a Shilling A Week’ and ‘How to teach your pet Spaniel Esperanto in three easy stages.’
8. A hideous wooden lamp stand which seems to be carved with grape leaves and which is monstrous and off putting, more off putting than Meatloaf.  There is no bulb, there is no lightshade. It is doubtful if it works, but it came with the fourteen occasional tables as a job lot and they must now think of something to do with it.  I suggested burning it, or turning it into a scale model of Chartres Cathedral.  My mother fondly hopes that she will find a lamp shade to ‘tone it down’.  It would have to be the size of one of Uncle Fester’s best dresses in order to do that, but I wish her luck.  No doubt it will turn up the next time she buys a job lot of tables.
9. Various musical instruments in different stages of decay, no stops, no strings, no bridge, but which might be nice one day if your dad gets around to doing ‘o level musical instrument fixings’.
10. A weird painting of a giant bird.  Some more weird paintings of people bending over in a field. Some other weird paintings of important Victorian people pointing at things and sporting large moustaches.

This is just the stuff on the ground floor.  I will go no further.  I will say however, that their house is never dull and the children love rootling around in the undergrowth and finding new and ever more strange things.  Occasionally they will also have things that I love.  Today I came home with a first edition St Trinian’s book with fantastic illustrations by Ronald Searle, which is rather splendid.  I also have my eye on a large wooden chest (we already have four in the house and Jason wouldn’t let me have another one. Shame), a rather nice Art Nouveau mirror, and some wooden filing drawers that are just needful.  Luckily they don’t often sell me the things that I like, or my house would look like theirs! The problem is that they feel compelled to give me a discount, or in my mother’s case give me stuff for free.  This causes problems because they then make a loss, and have no stock to sell, so I have to wait to see if they can’t sell whatever it is I want, when they will then occasionally give/sell it to me, as long as they haven’t broken/mislaid or put it somewhere safe in the meantime.  As I generally have quite a good eye, this doesn’t happen very often, and so I wistfully pat things on the head as they leave, never to be seen again.

Apart from marvelling at all the new stuff and things they have filled their house with, the children were finally able to play in the garden because the weather was rather nice.  My mum has bought some frankly hideous garden gnomes.  She hid them in the borders and made the children go and find them (one each).  When they returned, triumphant, muddy and covered in pollen, she told them that the gnomes have to live outside and that they come alive in the night time and play with each other.  Tallulah is now pestering us to go round to granny’s for a sleepover so that she can creep about the garden in the dark surprising chattering gnomes and is very, very excited.

She created a cunning gnome trap where she stole Tilly’s coat, took it down the garden and threw it over the gnomes to make them think it was dark, so they would come alive.  She went away for a few minutes to give them time to acclimatise (and cadge a biscuit off of her gran no doubt).  While she was gone Tilly went to find her coat, put it on and moved the gnomes to a different place, so they could have a new view.  Tallulah returned and was duly amazed at the fact that her trap had worked. She came haring up the garden so fast she nearly made a vapour trail bless her! She was absolutely convinced it had worked and is now adamant that they come alive.  Mum was triumphant!

Jamie came over in the afternoon and took the girls away to his house.  It gave Oscar a chance to sneak upstairs to the toy room and play with Tallulah’s desk.  He loves Tallulah’s desk with a passion and he’s never allowed to sit there and open all the drawers when she’s around.  Granny promised not to tell and he had a high old time colouring in and shuffling everything around.  She won’t know, mum will probably tell her it was one of the gnomes!

Oscar is teething.  He has had a really high temperature for two days, is dribbling like a fiend and can’t eat because it makes him cry to chew. He’s doing very well for a boy who is being denied sustenance, but he has been a tad grumpy at times. Understandably, I might add.  His best thing all weekend has been to splash around in a cool bath.  He likes standing up and then sitting down abruptly with his arms stretched out shouting ‘SPLASH’ and making maximum noise and wetness everywhere.  I haven’t had the heart to scold him about it, being as how he’s having such a crappy time.  It has bought him great joy.

He’s in bed.  Jason’s downstairs reading a book about cybernetic mutant monks who turn out to be killing machines, who knew? And I’m writing this, having watched a spectacular sunset and having finally been allowed on the Leonardo Forum for the OU.  I got locked out because the permissions people had forgotten me.  I managed to get in today to find tons of messages, a scarily efficient tutor and the woeful knowledge that I am now behind, even though the course only started two days ago.  I now have to abandon my plans to read for pleasure after this next review book, and get myself back to my Renaissance doublet and hose pronto.  Bum!

On another bookish note, I looked up some book lists yesterday.  You know, the equivalent to that book I was talking about yesterday? I found the Penguin list of 100 books that they  consider you should have read before you die.  It was compiled in 2006.  I print it below for your delectation.  I thought it was quite an odd list.  It has things like James Bond books for example, but doesn’t have Jane Eyre.  Anyway, I counted how many I’d read.  I’ve only managed 53, which is a bit crap for someone claiming to be well read.  Worse than that.  Some of the ones I haven’t read, I haven’t even heard of.  I fear I must now live to be at least 150.  There’s a lot of work to be done.  All the ones in bold are the ones I’ve read:

1. Three Men in a Boat – Jerome K Jerome
2. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh
4. The Picture of Dorian Grey – Oscar Wilde
5. The Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
6. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
7. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
8. The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
9. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
10. Diamonds are Forever – Ian Fleming
11. A Room with a View – E.M. Forster
12. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
13. Love in a Cold Climate – Nancy Mitford
14. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
15. Middlemarch – George Eliot
16. She – H. Rider Haggard
17. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
18. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
19. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
20. Bram Stoker’s Dracula – Bram Stoker
21. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
22. The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole
23. The Turn of the Screw – Henry James
24. Vanity Vair – William Makepeace Thackeray
25. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
26. Emma – Jane Austen
27. Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
28. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Beautiful and the Damned – F. Scott Fitzgerald
31. Animal Farm – George Orwell
32. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
33. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
34. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
35. The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
36. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
37. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
38. A Study in Scarlet – Arthur Conan Doyle
39. The Thirty Nine Steps – John Buchan
40. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
41. Therese Raquin – Emile Zola
42. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
43. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
44. I Claudius – Robert Graves
45. The Twelve Caesars – Suetonius
46. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
47. The Iliad – Homer
48. From Russia With Love – Ian Fleming
49. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
50. The Diary of a Nobody – George Weedon Grossmith
51. Pickwick Papers – Charles Dickens
52. Scoop – Evelyn Waugh
53. Lucky Jim – Kingsley Amis
54. The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
55. Guys and Dolls
56. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
57. Hangover Square – Patrick Hamilton
58. The Beggars Opera – John Gay
59. The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler
60. Les Liaisons Dangereuse – Pierre Choderlos de Laclos
61. The Monkey Wrench Gang – Edward Abbey
62. The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli
63. Bound for Glory – Woody Guthrie
64. Death of a Salesman – Arthur Miller
65. Maigret and the Ghost – Georges Simenon
66. Confessions of an English Opium Eater – Thomas De Quincey
67. Subterraneans – Jack Kerouac
68. Monsieur Monde Vanishes – Georges Simenon
69. Junky – William S. Burroughs
70. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
71. Diary of a Madman and Other Stories – Nikolai Gogol
72. Story of the Eyes – Georges Bataille
73. A Spy in the House of Love – Anais Nin
74. Venus in Furs – Leopold von Sacher Masoch
75. The Karamazov Brothers –Fyodor Dosteovsky
76. The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
77. The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad
78. Don Juan – Lord George Gordon Byron
79. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof – Tennessee Williams
80. The Fight – Norman Mailer
81. No Easy Walk to Freedom – Nelson Mandela
82. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
83. Notre Dame of Paris – Victor Hugo
84. The Old Curiosity Shop – Charles Dickens
85. Baby Doll – Tennessee Williams
86. The Odyssey – Homer
87. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
88. Against Nature – Joris Karl Husyman
89. The Autobiography of Malcolm X – Malcolm X
90. The Outsider – Albert Camus
91. The Communist Manifesto – Karl Marx
92. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
93. The Time Machine – H.G. Wells
94. The Man in the High Castle – Philip K. Dick
95. The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells
96. The Day of the Triffids – John Wyndham
97. We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
98. Hells Angels: A Strange and Terrible Journey – Hunter S. Thompson
99. Another Country – James Baldwin
100. Notes from the Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky